Thank you all for the comments. I am happy with how the trees look now. The clump foliage did the trick!
Now to let a few of you know where part of my frustration is coming from. I own a small business working wth college students. It is basically a small school and we help college students pass classes that they find difficult. Finals where the last two weeks, and work kept me very busy. School ended last Wednesday, but life has taken most of my time up since then. As well as the demands of others.
I have basically been going for two weeks straight without the time to sit and relax. Nor have I had the time to catch up on much needed rest. Tomorrow is Sunday a day of rest and that is exactly what I am going to do is rest and get myself back where I usually am. I am turning off the phone, and not answering any difficult emails.
I may work on the castle, but that is easy work. It is much different from the other two builds. I am painting it up first and then putting it together. This will be far too difficult to paint after it is done.
The good thing about painting is you do a little and then let it sit for hours to dry. So it is perfect for a relaxing day.
Quaralane: I am sure it will. I know I can figure this one out, it will just take time. I have plenty of that before this contest is done. Especially since Godzilla is close to finished. And I really don't expect too much trouble out of the castle. ;D The diorama part will be fun and I have a good idea of how to do that in the back of my head.
Norm: Here are a few photos so you can see where I am. I have three parts to practice with. They are extras left over from the neck and the tail. The first one shows the side of the tail piece:
This is here so you can see the texture I am trying to achieve. This is my goal in other words.
This is my second attempt to replicate that:
It is getting closer but still not there. Now if I covered the entire model with that texture it would probably work, or if I used it for ridges along the top of the tail. The problem is that won't work on the legs nor the neck seams.
And this is my attempt at a texture stamp:
It was my first try and it isn't too bad. I think with practice I will get it. But I won't touch it until I have some rest. I get too frustrated too easily right now and I think it is best to let it sit a bit. I have the next two weeks away from work so I will get a lot done for sure.
As for the video, there is some sort of compression. My camera takes AVCHD videos, and my editor converts them to a YouTube approved format. On my video editor, I select YouTube upload and then 16:9 ratio. The editor does the rest. It does save the video as a mp4 format. The last segment was 270Mb of data and took about 40 minutes to upload. The original file size was 743 Mb of data.
